Converting 1.4M lines of code from Flash to Haxe

Gaming development company, FlowPlay, has converted its Vegas World app from Flash to Haxe.

FlowPlay has announced the completion of an extensive overhaul of the company’s flagship social casino game, Vegas World. The relaunch follows nearly eighteen months of engineering work focused on improving key elements of the user interface including the conversion of all graphics from vector to bitmaps and rebuilding the client-side application to transform the front-end technology. The effort included the transition of 1.4 million lines of code from a Flash-based codebase to Haxe, in the largest ever project to leverage the open-source, cross-platform development technology.

After years of speculation, Adobe officially announced in July that it will no longer support Flash technology by the end of 2020. Once considered the foremost development solution for the casual games industry, Flash has fallen out of favor in recent years, particularly as mobile use has grown. Today, the thousands of casual games that remain on Flash are in danger of vanishing alongside the sunsetting browser plugin. As new platforms launch, development technologies evolve, and the rapid shift to mobile continues, FlowPlay’s approach to relaunching Vegas World provides a case study for other Flash developers looking for a long-term, cross-platform solution to ensure the future viability of their games.

“FlowPlay embarked on a tremendous undertaking with the complete transition of 1.4 million lines of code. The official relaunch of Vegas World not only marks years of work by FlowPlay’s engineering team, but also a major milestone for Haxe given the scale of the project and broad utilization of the toolkit,” said Nicolas Cannasse, creator of Haxe. “FlowPlay’s contributions to the Haxe community based on the Vegas World project are invaluable and can pave the way for other developers that will use Haxe to make the leap away from Flash over the next two years.”

“What differentiates Vegas World from other social casinos, and other casual games more broadly, is our focus on a community experience. An essential element of that is the ability to have seamless, platform-agnostic access for players to connect with friends in Vegas World in real-time, regardless from which platform either player enters,” said Doug Pearson, CTO at FlowPlay. “Haxe is the only solution available today that allowed us to stay true to the mission to put the needs of our community first, and the years of engineering energy culminating in this relaunch were well worth the effort.”

While FlowPlay maintains a PC-first strategy for Vegas World, the company continues to expand further into mobile to maintain a cross-platform presence, bring a diverse set of offerings to market, and reach new audiences. The Haxe codebase has allowed for the launch of new mobile titles including Vegas World Slots, available now for iOS and Android devices, with Vegas World Casino coming in January.

“Creating a truly cross-platform experience for a massively multiplayer online game is a huge endeavor. Thousands of people are playing Vegas World at any given time, to connect, chat, and gift in-game goods, and they ultimately do not care about the client technology, just the experience and ability to play how, when, and where they want to,” said Craig Robinson, VP of Mobile at FlowPlay. “While this transition was certainly critical to the sustainability of Vegas World in terms of Flash no longer being a viable technology, our approach and use of Haxe has set FlowPlay up for success as a social casino, casual games, and mobile developer for years to come, ready to take on whatever the industry brings.”

Following significant contributions to the Haxe open-source community, FlowPlay also recently became a strategic partner of the Haxe Foundation which aims to fund the long-term development of the toolkit. Through this partnership, the company will support game developers looking to evaluate the technology as a potential solution and contribute to the evolution of the open-source platform.

As an extension of the partnership, FlowPlay will host the inaugural US Haxe Summit from May 3-5, 2018 at the Seattle Hilton.